Note: This project has been moved over from its original thread on Super ONM

I have always been in to games ever since I was put in front of a 16k spectrum at the age of 2. The point in time which I tended to considerd to be Video Games golden age however has always been the 16bit era, I always had a real big soft spot for the Super Nintendo and the MegaDrive, when I would play an older game it would usually be one from one of these two systems and the same would be true when I used to look at buying older games as well. I have always enjoyed doing creative things, I wanted to be a writer from the age of 8 but never quiet thought I was good enough to do it. Every now and again I would set myself up some kind of project to distract myself usually the bigger a distraction I needed the bigger the project this would be. I made youtube videos based on reviewing Megadrive games and then I wrote and published my first short story and then my first novel. I always wanted to keep myself busy and to sort of have something to show for it.

I guess my attempt to review 150 SNES games was born from this. I at one time worked 70 hours a week as a pub manager but due to a combination of PTSD (Post traumatic Stress Disorder) as well as epilepsy and issues surrounding these I found myself unemployed. I was raising my daughter as a single parent which was a lot of work but I found that in the day while she was at school I needed something to do in order to keep me sane. My first attempt at this was to work as a volunteer for a children's charity as a mentor but when this charity closed down and I still hadn't managed to find a job I needed something else to channel my energy into and it was then looking at my old games that the idea hit me. I would play and review 150 SNES games in 150 days. Things didn't quite work out like this as despite things starting off well real life got in the way, people died, people left my life, I got new jobs,but I never gave in, I just slowed down. Soon I reassessed the projects place in my life and decided that I needed to do this I needed to finish it off and actually review 150 SNES games I just needed to do it at my own time, making sure that the truly important things like my daughter, my health and my responsibilities came first. In all honesty though this project has been and is a sort of therapy for me, but it is one which I hope will also bring enjoyment to others.

Here in this thread you will see a whole bunch of my reviews all of the ones which were hosted by SONM. I plan to put all of my new reviews here while also posting some of the old ones as articles as I find them, clean them up and occasionally add to them. This has been quiet a long and sometimes grueling project but I intend to get it finished this year and this is where I am kind of asking you all to help, the more people read my stuff, and the more they comment on it the more supported I feel and the easier it is to press on and to remind myself to stop procrastinating and get down to work as I have an audience waiting on me.

With this said if you have read this far or read any of my reviews then thank you very much so without further ado here is a list of all of the Games I have reviewed and where possible either links or the page number you will find them at on this thread.

I have read a lot about this game over the years, I have seen all kinds of quotes about it some positive, some a little negative heck I have even seen it called ‘’the game that saved the Snes’’. Now how a game that came out in 1994. I will admit it gave the machine a good kick up the butt and probably helped with sales a lot.

A lot of games have seemed to focus too much energy on their visuals, sacrificing other key areas trying to sell themselves of the idea of being raw eye candy and this game has been accused of exactly that. Shigeru Miyamoto himself claimed that this very game was ‘’proof that American gamers will buy anything so long as it just looks pretty.’’ Some people believe that the graphics have not aged as well as some of the less complicated and expensive games from that time period but I have to disagree. I like the way it looks, I like the way it sounds Ladies and Gentleman I give you Donkey Kong Country.

I have already touched on Rare twice while doing this string of reviews and stories You might remember that I said that in the early days of the SNES Rare released very little, in fact all they really did was Battletoads in Battlemaniacs but as I pointed out before they spent most of their NES profits on expensive workstations, these were used for Killer Instinct but they were also used for Donkey Kong country and its sequels.

The reveal of Donkey Kong country is a huge story in its self but put simply Nintendo used the games shockingly good graphics as part of one of the best reveals they have ever done. We all knew that they were working on the Ultra 64 (the N64) so we were more or less certain we would see a prototype N64 game or some kind of test footage something to excite us and get us desperately needing there new machine. So when they showed Donkey Kong Country everyone was amazed they thought well if this is what the N64 is going to be able to do on day 1 then that’s amazing the true shock came though when they turned around and went oh and It is a SNES game.

From that moment on more or less all of my friends were absolutely desperate to get the game on the second of release. I can’t remember how much it went for I will say 40 but it might have been more. I knew though that I didn’t have that money I had spent it on to many other things so I thought oh well I guess that’s a Christmas game. I did all sorts of things to get my games cheap back then it’s something I have always done. I hit a stroke of luck there was a local pawn store it mostly dealt with records and videos it was called “Adam’s Audio” now they sometimes got games and other stuff in they got a Cart only copy of Donkey Kong Country in not long after release about a week or so and I paid 20 pounds for it. Yeah 20 quid for a cart only seems like a lot, but I still own this cart and with the amount I have played it, it is more than worth it, at the time though my thoughts were firmly on not getting left behind. I knew that this was a game people would be playing all of the time until they had finished it, there would be school based discussions about who was the furthest through it, bets on who would complete it first and many discussions about the best piece of music, the coolest level etcetera. At the time I was young and naïve I never questioned how a cart only copy of Donkey Kong came in to existence, how both a manual and box could be lost or damaged beyond all repair that quickly, I guess there could have been an accident but thinking back and knowing what the area I grew up in is like there was probably some poor kid crying his Donkey Kong had been stolen.

The graphics blew me away but I thought the sound was even better. I had always been a pessimist so I fully expected the game to be shallow and be well total trash when put next to the Mario games, but how wrong I was. It was very fun, very well thought out and I loved not only the graphics of the characters but the work which had clearly gone in to there characterisation. This and Killer Instinct were the games that put the name Rare into my head. I had played BattleToads, I had played there NES games, heck I owned a lot of the stuff they had done back on the Spectrum back when they were called “Ultimate play the game”. It was after this that I would go out and look for games with the Rare logo. I even loved a lot of their stuff other people haven’t been keen on I was a huge fan of grabbed by the ghoulies for example, and Kameo. I had hoped for a while that they would take all they had learned over the years both from making games and from there association with Nintendo and would end up making games with a sort of Nintendo flavour on Microsoft platforms, unfortunately they are now largely dead though. Unlike some people though when I now play Donkey Kong I still love it, I still hum along to the music, tap my foot and have a whale of a time.

I think the game is a definite 8 out of 10. If you want to play it your probably going to pay somewhere around 15 for a cart of it, Boxed copies can go for a lot more sometimes stupidly high but I have seen them go for as little as 25quid.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 1:58 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Once again it seems like this thread is set to become a mass Capcom love in, maybe it’s the fact that Capcom did a heck of a lot for the machine or maybe it’s the fact that I happen to have a fair few of their games but here we are talking about them again.

For those who owned a NES the Mega Man games were kind of special, they were hard, challenging but also good. The only complaint that could be raised about them really was that with so many sequels and the format staying the same the idea was being milked a little dry. Still that’s the main complaint that can be levelled at Capcom as a whole when they have something that is selling well they grab hold of its teats and milk the idea, the franchise for all that it is worth.

I have mentioned before that when I am collecting retro games I look for ones from various categories including ones I have owned before, ones friends owned and ones I have only heard about. Well one of my friends owned Mega Man X, one and one only but it was one of his favourite games so we would play it basically every time I was over there and this went on for several months.

In short Megaman X is close to being the perfect platform shooter. It takes everything great about the amazing NES Megaman games and adds the super touch to them. Better brighter graphics, great sound track, extra power ups, well hidden secrets, the introduction of Zero the coolest character to ever hit a Megaman game (who played this game and didn’t wish they were zero because he oozed coolness). I was kind of surprised at the time that this game wasn’t given the Super name treatment but I am very glad that it did not after all Mega Man X sounds far cooler than Super Mega Man would have. If you have played one of the NES titles then you will know exactly what to expect, you work your way through a level until you get to the boss. You fight the boss and if you beat him you get his weapon. You can take on the levels in any order you like and this adds some strategy to proceedings as you start to think about what weapon you would like to have in order to take on a certain boss, so for example if you want a fire weapon to fight an ice boss then you will have to do the level with the fire boss in it first. A lot of the extra power ups the hidden ones seemed to be put in places where they would be found by the curious, I often found them when I said something on the lines of ‘’I wonder if I could’’ before trying something on a whim. This is great it makes the game seem like it is filled with almost limitless possibilities.

I remember a lot of us did think the X was referring to 10. Even when they referred to the Megaman in the game as X this never really sunk in. Sure he might have been called X but the name on the box was still supposed to mean Mega Man 10 right? It was only when X2 came that everyone seemed to go what not 11? Ok so X was X.The only complaint I have with this game is the password system which is pretty decent but id have preferred a battery save. The best thing is though that the game is challenging and even tough in places making you invent new swear words to use at the bosses but never does it feel like the games fault. You always feel if you die you are to blame and that you will do better next time. Couple this with how fun this game is and you have the perfect reason to game into the early hours.

It is good to see how many times over the years this has been ported and re-released on to different systems, it means a lot of people will have played the game who otherwise might not have been exposed to it. The game can be little costly to buy for the SNES I have seen pal copies go for amounts I don’t care to think of, you can pay like 50quid just for a cart. If you can play imports you should be able to get an American copy for around 35, that’s what mine is. The Psp version a remaster can be got for around 10 to 15 pound complete so if you own a PSP that’s not a bad way to go. Still I give this game a 9 out of 10.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Everybody knows about advertisement games. Heck a few years ago we got the quiet brilliant for a freebie Doritos Crash Course on the Xbox live arcade, which if you have an xbox 360 and haven’t played I strongly recommend you download and have a bash at now. Back in the megadrive and SNES days though and before as well sometimes whole 40quid games would be released which were basically an advertisement in video game form. You probably think that by starting the review in this way I am going to talk about Cool spot, but I am not for one as far as I can remember I only own it on megadrive.

The game I am going to talk about some of you might have played but you might have never realised that it started its life as an advert in game form. I am talking about Pushover.

Pushover is a platform puzzle game which was developed by Red Rat Software and published by Ocean Software in 1992 for the Amiga, Atari ST and DOS. The game was sponsored by Quavers (Yes the cheesy crisp snack which most of us have probably tried) The games story was that Quavers mascot Colin Curly (who I think is long since dead and gone) lost his Quavers packet down a giant ant hill and needed the help of an ant controlled by you the player to retrieve it.

The SNES version lacks the Quavers branding, and instead the aim is to recover bundles of cash dropped down the ant hill by someone called Captain Rat. I have tried to read and look into if there is a reason behind this but can’t really seem to find one.

Advert games seemed quite common back then there was a series of 16 bit games based on Chester Cheetah, the McDonald's game "Mic and Mac: Global Gladiators then there were the games less based on a snack but seemed to be at least sponserd by something for example Robocod heavily featured Penguin chocolate bars and Zool was sponsored by Chupa Chups. I haven’t played the SNES version of Robocod so I am not sure if it has penguin bars in it, there was a McDonalds game on the NES so I can’t see Nintendo having had an issue with adverts.

This game came at a time when things like Lemmings Humans and Lost Vikings which were all popping up on various formats. So there seemed to be a decent little market for this kind of thing, and well it was nice to have something that was a puzzle game that wasn’t Tetris. I don’t tend to talk to many people who have played this game though and if you pick it up and try it now then you might be shocked by a few things. Graphically, this is one of the simplest looking games you will find on the SNES. I think the NES or Master System could probably handle the graphics of this game, it really does not make much use of the SNES. Don’t expect any mode 7 or well any graphical tricks or niceties at all… would they improve the game probably not would they have added a little to the presentation Yes.

You will always feel like you’re playing on a very basic home computer game The main character is an ant which has only a hand full of frames of animation as he walks around and pushes and lifts domino on the one-screen levels. The background are incredibly simple, Yes it was an early game on the SNES, and is also a puzzle game, with the focus being on the solution of puzzles but it still feels super basic. Music is also very basic and can get on your nerves when you have been listening to it again and again when you get stuck and believe me you will get stuck.

So basically the player is presented with a number of different dominos of in all the levels. Among these are standard dominos which roll once then fall over, tumbler dominos which will continue rolling until they make contact with another domino, exploder dominos, and bridge dominos etcetera. The main goal in all the levels is to pick the dominos up, place them in a position where one domino will hit the others and result in all of them being knocked over with one push.

The levels are always based on one screen, there is no scrolling in any direction what so ever what you see is what you get. The basic graphics hide what at times can be a fiendishly complex set of puzzles. As the game goes on the variety of dominoes you have to deal with increases as does the difficulty and frustration. If hard puzzles make you scream and tear at your own hair this will not really be one for you. If your happy to spend a good twenty minutes messing around pondering and thinking about solutions and if you feel great excitement from feeling a plan work out then you can get a lot from this game

One of the problems with retro games is that when you come back to them latter or when you find the game latter in your life there are far more impressive things out there already. I find it hard to recommend this game because I think much better things have come out more recently. If pushed to give pushover a rating I would be inclined to give it the very average 5 out of 10. I wouldn't worry about trying to buy it for your SNES, if you try to play this on a TV over 14 inches it is going to look absolutely shocking. If you have a gba or a dreamcast just get chu chu rocket it is similar in the way that your trying to work out puzzles which require a bit of thought but it has much better graphics, music, presentation. If you have one in fact I would recommend the Android version of Chu Chu rocket it is a great little game to pull out on a train.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I have wrote a lot about Capcom while I have been looking at SNES games largely because I tend to own quite a few of their games but also because they were a bit of a power house back in the SNES days, they weren’t the only company that was producing brilliant games though there was also Konami.

Konami has existed since 1969 but originally it was a jukebox rental and repair business in Osaka, Japan.In 1973 they began working on manufacturing amusement machines for arcades. Their first actual game machines were not created until 1978 though and these games were called Block Game, Block Invader, Space Ship, Space King and I have to admit to never having played a single one of them however I have heard that Space King was a space invaders rip off.

Konami’s real success as far as games go began in the year of my birth 1981 with games including Amidar, Frogger and scramble all of which I have played enjoyed and owned at some point on at least one system, in fact I was playing frogger with my father on the Atari 2600 just a few years later. Konami made approximately 50 games for the Super Famicom/Nintendo and we probably got about 30 of them over here, but I want to talk about one of the games they brought out in their first year of producing Super Nintendo games.

The game was very important not just then but now as well, largely because it comes from a series that started before the SNES and still exists to this day. In fact my reason for choosing to play this game today was not entirely random. I was in a community based charity shop and I brought a bunch of old Playstation magazines for peanuts mostly just for something fun to flick through on the bus ride home. I love looking at previews of games with the hindsight of knowing what became of them while flicking through one of the magazines though I found something I always used to love as a kid and that was an A to Z of reviews. Basically a huge list of games with a quick one line review and a score. Now in the world we live in now days with people accusing magazines and websites of taking bribes and a lack of faith in some reviewer’s people might wonder why these lists used to excite me so, but as a child with a limited income I would remove these pages from the magazines back in the SNES days and onwards and take them with me just in case I saw a cheap game on a market or in a pawn store or on sale.

I sat flipping through this list of playstation scores and found myself actually calling bullshit on some of them. That is when I saw one review I had to call mega mega bull gooseberry fool on and that was Castlevania Symphony of the Night 7 out of 10. Now to me Castlevania Symphony of the night was one of the very best games I ever played on the playstation 1 and what is more it is a game I still hold in massive regard. How does this relate to the Snes you might ask? Well it is simple I have always loved Castlevania and when I first Played Super Castlevania IV I was certain that it was the pinical of its series and that things would never get any better than that.

Castlevaina IV came out in 1991 it is considered an action-platformer and is also largly considered to be a remake of the original Castlevania on the NES (A remake that adds on extra features ups the power and gets rid of some problems). It was developed and published by Konami and is the first Castlevania game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It has been re-released on the Wii Virtual Console in 2006 and has also found its way on to the Wii U VC in 2013.

It features improved graphics in general plus very cool use of the Super Nintendo’s mode 7. The game also features a brilliant soundtrack which mixes brand new tunes in with remixed and improved versions of some of the classic NES music. The game takes place in the year 1691 in Transylvania. You play as vampire hunter Simon Belmont with your quest being simple, find and destroy Count Dracula. Now the graphics might look quite simple now days and on first impression some of the graphics are a little basic and functional but then there are extra special moments where the whole screen will turn and pivot when you will really get to see and appreciate all of the effort that went in to the game. The soundtrack though I don’t feel has aged at all, sure we now live in a world where full on CD quality real songs exist in games but when I have this game in my slot and I am playing I never once stop and think this could be better, I simply think this music is kick ass and fits in so well with everything.

The game is reasonably challenging, sure it is not as hard as the NES versions but a lot of the challenge in them came from either cryptic guess work, control issues and deaths which felt unjust, none of this is present in this game. When you die in this game you never feel like you’ve been cheated or drawn the short straw you instead simply feel like you need to try harder. This game polished up everything that was Castlevania and I cannot see how the game could remain the same and get any better than this. For a long time it felt like this would be the pinnacle of the series as when the N64 versions came out the 3D aspect of the game and its controls brought with them an increase in both confusion and a disconnect between skill and achievement, the games took a step backwards. It wasn’t until the playstation 1 Castlevania came about and bits of Metriod and RPG stats were grafted on to the game that the improvement’s began again but for raw platforming action you can’t do much better than the 4th one in the series.

I give this game a very very strong 8 out of 10 in fact lets call it an 8.5 and this is taking how it has aged in to account, back in the day I would have given it a solid 10 out of 10 but I have tasted the MetriodVania style newer flavours since then.

This is a game which it might be better to turn to the Virtual Console for… Both English and American Cartridge only copies easily sell for around the 40 quid price point. One fair thing to point out though is that this game has no battery backup. Continuing is all password based so that’s one thing that you don’t need to worry about. I used to have both an NTSC and a Pal cart of this game but I sold the Pal cart around 4 years ago and got 25pounds for it…when I had found it on a market for 3 quid. I kept the NTSC cart as it was the one I had owned as a child so it had more sentimental value. (Since I wrote this I have ended up with a Japanese cartridge as well).

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Dragon's Lair was a laserdisc based arcade game published by Cinematronics in 1983. In the game, you played as Dirk the Daring a knight attempting to rescue Princess Daphne from the foul wizard Mordroc's castle and the claws of an evil dragon. It featured animation by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth yes that Don Bluth the main man responsible for The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, the land before time and all dogs go to heaven cartoon feature films.

Now back when Dragons lair came out the vast majority if not all other games represented characters as sprites, which in simple terms are a series of pixels displayed in succession to form an image. Due to hardware limitations of this a lot of game artists were greatly restricted in the detail they could put in to a character, for example take the original classic NES Mario he had a moustache to make his face a little more obvious and a hat to hide his hair and a lack of real features or detail. Dragon's Lair overcame those limitations by tapping into the vast storage potential of the LaserDisc, the idea being that you could be in control of full on cartoon characters bursting with detail but unfortunately this imposed limitations on the actual gameplay.

If you haven’t played Dragons Lair then think of it like all of those games on the Mega CD the full motion video kind where you watch a film and an occasional press of the right button at just the right time influences the outcome. This is pretty much how Dragons Lair played, it was great to watch and I remember it shocking the heck out of people in the arcades in its day but it was a definite case of style over substance, even though I find it fun for what it is.

The success of Dragons Lair sparked numerous home ports, sequels and related games though and that what I am here to talk about today, one of its ports the Super Nintendo port to be precise.So the first question in your minds will be how did they port a laser disc cartoon based game to the SNES did they try to stick to the source material and make a cut down version of the arcade machine which functioned to the best of the SNES’s abilities keeping the style over substance mantra intact or did they just fudge it and make some kind of regular cash in platformer or did they do something really bizarre well close your eyes take 10 seconds and guess.

If you guess generic platformer congratulations you were right. The story is basically the same. You are still a daring knight out to rescue a princess from a dragon. Imagine a castlevania light, remove the whip remove the amazing music and graphics and replace them with a basic repeating tune of very little worth, some grunting noises for bits and pieces like getting hit and imagine you had the Axe weapon you can get in castlevania but its unlimited. No mode 7 fancyness well apart from maybe the way the attract screen has the title rotate in to view, by and large though what you have are basic Amiga style graphics, areas of map that seem to be repeated and repeated with different exits added on. It is a pretty challenging game well unless you have played the NES port, the NES version is impossible and so in comparison makes this one feel like a piece of piss. It is still harder than it needs to be. You might say oh but if you try and try again and get better then youll find some enjoyment. No you won’t the game is kind of boring and had that I could stop playing this any time and find something better to do very quickly kind of feel. There is some better music latter in tge game and things do get a little more varied but it never feels like quiet enough. Somewhere deep inside this there are elements of a good game trying to make their way out, I personally just don’t think enough attention was paid on it because they thought what the heck it’s one of the most incredible arcade games as far as shock and awe goes, pin the name on this bitch and throw it out and see the dollars role on in.

If you try this game you will notice a two player option. Now Dragon's Lair is one of those annoying not really two player games where you simply take turns on each stage using the same character. Exactly the same character no change of color or anything fancy here at all. I never saw the point in this kind of two player mode myself you might as well just take turns on the one player mode.

My score 4/10 … its below average but it’s not a complete abomination or anything.. If you saw it for a few quid I would say give it a bash but if it ever came on Virtual console Id say the standard 6.50 you pay for a Snes game could be used on much better games If you ever get the chance though I would strongly recommend you check out the arcade version though since it is a very cool concept and kind of a piece of video game history. I haven’t seen a machine in years though so maybe you'll have to consider going down the emulation route.

Maybe Tomorrow I will look at the only none Mario title I know to have a Tanooki in it.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I know that in the past I have complained like hell about games which appeared on the Amiga and then made their way to home consoles. A lot of this has been down to 15quid disc based games being shoe horned on to a cartridge with no improvements and 40pounds being charged for them.The game I am going to talk about right now was initially released for the Amiga in 1992 but you won’t hear any moaning from me. It was then ported to MS-DOS, Acorn, Mega Drive/Genesis and Super Nintendo in 1993. CD-ROM versions of Flashback followed a year later coming to the Mega-CD, 3DO, CD-I and well just about everything you can think of that had a disc tray. It ended up getting its final initial release on the Jaguar around 1995 but this wouldn’t be the end of it.

Flashback, (AKA Flashback: The Quest for Identity in the USA), is a science fiction cinematic platform game developed by Delphine Software. Once again I have been thinking about reviewing this game for a long time, I wanted to get a few things out of the way one was the Prince of Persia which I managed to do a few weeks ago, the other was Another World/Out of this World. You will most likely have noticed that I have not reviewed Another World well this is basically because I was certain I owned a loose cart of it on the Snes but can’t seem to find it right now, I did find a Megadrive cart in my stuff so maybe my memory just fooled me.

This game can basically be either described as a futuristic game standing on the shoulders of Prince of Persia, or as the spiritual sequel to another world it feels very similar to both of these but I would argue it is a definite progression from both of them. (It is worth noting that Another World did get an actual sequel but as it was a Mega CD exclusive it is not very well known).

The game was originally advertised with claims such as the first "CD-ROM game on a cartridge" It is kind of easy to see why and it certainly helped get people hyped for the experience it had to offer. The game was a commercial and critical success. It wasn’t just a darling of the critics though, everyone I knew who brought it seemed to absolutely love it, even my own brother who hates having to do any platforming, jumping or puzzles and only wants to shoot things was drawn in to this game. The game has a place in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling French game of all time.

The story in Flashback felt like a video game version of an 80’s sci fi action film, you take on the role of a man called Conrad. Now somehow Conrad has lost his memory and is being chased by the police. Initially you have no idea who you are or why you are being chased, soon you find a holocube which contains a message, a message Conrad has recorded for himself which lets him know that he should make his way to the city and find his friend. The game always sort of reminded me of a combination of films such as Blade Runner and Total Recoil and I think these kinds of mental comparisons really work in its favor.

There is a brilliant streak of realism in the game, the way you move and what you are capable of all seem very human but it goes beyond this. The objects that you encounter in the game are also realistic. All of the objects you find are just lying on the floor there is no floating icons or strange object hovering in the air without explanation. When an enemy dies he lies on the floor dead, instead of disappearing or turning into an item, it’s a nice little touch.

The controls are a little bit hard to master. Your character moves in a way which makes it obvious that you are moving within a pre-assigned grid, a step forward and step backwards will always result in you moving the exact same amount of distance. This can at times be a touch confusing for example if you think you are standing below an overhanging ledge sometimes you will jump up and not be able to grab it, after a little bit of playing around you will realize that you were in fact one step away from where you needed to be. All of the movements seem to be bound somewhat by reality, if you draw your gun and turn to fire it won’t all happen as an instant thing, you will see the pauses between these motions as your character realistically draws turns and shoots. Sometimes this might feel a touch annoying if you’re more used to arcade style play but you soon become accustomed to the characters limitations and learn to work with what you have. For the modern player this game lacks a tutorial you feel very thrown in to the thick of things but that is just the way most games were back then.

I loved the graphics back then and I still love them now they are a mix of the closest that could be gotten to realistic back then and classy cartoon. The backgrounds are beautiful and differ greatly from stage to stage. The cut scene and in game graphics fit brilliantly together. As for the sound the game can be very quiet at times, sometimes all you can hear is quiet background environmental noises and the sound of your own footsteps but I find that this often lends to the tension. There are also what some would call Zelda like musical success tunes for when you find something interesting It could be argued that there is almost no replay value in this game because of how story driven it is but it’s a long reasonably hard game which I feel is very satisfying so I don’t think this can really be taken as a serious fault.

The game can be got on ebay for around 7 to 10quid for a loose pal cart but then it has also been remade for the pc and the current consoles and the remake can be got for a similar price and I know the xbox 360 remake contains an emulated version of the original as well. It was also followed by a PS1 sequel called Fade to Black, it was years since I have played this, I seem to remember it was good but not anywhere near as good as flashback. I would give the game a good solid 8 out of 10… I am very much a fan of it.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The game I am about to talk about never had a release over here, in fact for a very long time I thought it was a Japanese only release but no it was translated into English for the American Market receiving several changes and cuts. If I was to say Tanuki and leave it at that you would assume that I was talking about some kind of Mario game but let’s face it any game which had Mario in it and hadn’t made it to the UK everyone would already know about. If I was to add that Tanuki’s were said to have very large testicles and that this little fact had been kept out of the Mario series this might give a few people a chuckle. The game I am talking about today though to my knowledge is the only Super Nintendo game to ever feature the tanuki’s engorged testes in all of their glory (except in the USA where they were edited out).

The game I am talking about today is Gōsō Jinrai Densetsu Musya, or Mushya for short. To start with I will give you a rough translation of the tile and that is Brave Spearman Jinrai's Legendery Warrior. It came out in 1992 and can proberbly best be described as an action platformer

It was developed by Jorudan and published by Datam. Jorudan is a Japanese video game publisher and developer headquartered in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It has been publishing and developing video games since 1991, they still exist today according to records but the last recorded game they released was Sukeban Shachou Rena a cat themed mini game collection on the Wii. They mostly seem to have done strange games that didn’t reach these stores very often but they also appeared to work on the odd port here and there. Datam was publishing stuff up to and including the PS2 days but nothing much anyone over here would know or care much about.

You play as a Pikeman who is the only survivor of a fierce battle. He collapses near a Village where he is informed by the villagers that their shrine maiden has been kidnapped by demons and basically this has left a door to hell wedged open. Without retrieving the maden the door to the abyss cannot be shut. So your job is to rescue her in order to close the gates to hell.

You don’t see to many video game heroes who wield a spear so in this regard Musya is kind of unique. The spear has excellent range to begin with and can be enhanced furtherwith collectable items. As well as being used to attack normally the spear/pike can be twirled around to attack although you’ll remain stationery during this animation so it is a little limited You can also jump like you have super human powers and are able to use Magic. Magic comes in the form of five spells with a new one granted upon defeating each boss.

This game will remind you of castlevania if you play it and that’s a good and a bad thing as I don’t mean super Castlevania 4, I mean Castlevania. This is not just because of some of the rigid animations used, it is also because for this kind of gamed you have a kind of limited toolset. You cant even hit enemies directly above you despite having a huge stick. Flying enemies are very common so having to leap to confront them is inconvenient when in reality youd just strike diagonally. There are a lot of bottomless pits and jumping off screen can lead to an unfortunate demise since you can’t see the ground again until it’s sailing past you on your way to death. The game is very unbalanced it basically lacks the amount of polish something like Castlevania 4 received. The spear lacks stopping power so even after an enemy has been hit they still continue to move towards you, add to this the fact that enemies will respawn immediately after death, making killing them almost pointless. Standard enemies go down in a few hits but boss battles tend to drag on forever, seriously you will be praying for them to just flipping die before your fingers drop off.

If you ever get a chance to play this then just last it out till you see the first boss, who is a demonized anatomically correct Tanuki. Once you have laughed at this turn off the game and play something better.

The graphics are average, the sound is average the game is just really average, I suppose in some ways it’s a good thing this game never made it to our shores. It is only something worth owning so you can go ‘’oh I have a really strange game with a Tanuki with balls in it”… If you need this game it can be got for about 8quid on cart for the Japanese version… The US version is a lot more and doesn’t feature Tanuki balls you have been warned. 4 out of 10 must try a lot harder

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja (known in Japan as Ganbare Goemon: Yukihime Kyūshutsu Emaki?) is an action adventure game for 1-2 players made by Konami. It was released for the Super NES in 1991 and was I would argue one of a kind.

It was the first game in the Japanese video game series Ganbare Goemon to have a western release. With its blend of action, humor, mini games and bizarreness it is kind of a small miracle that it ever made it out of Japan but even though this may be prematurely giving the game away I have to say it is one of my most loved Super Nintendo games.

The game has two main different styles of gameplay but then there is also a sprinkling of simple mini games and distractions. The first is sort of like a beat-'em-up as you as Kid Ying (aka Goemon) or you and a friend as Kid Ying and Dr Yang explores towns, fight enemies and visits shops. One shop see’s you able to seek employment, you can do a painting task which is basically an excuse to let you play snake, then there is whack a mole and if you can manage to do well at them you can make a nice little pile of money. This can then be spent in other shops where you can buy food to increase your energy or shoes to help you jump higher in the latter platforming-focused parts. The second part of the levels The platforming like sections attempting 2D side-scrolling stages that play in a way which will feel familiar to fans of other Konami franchises like Contra and Castlevania. You move from left to right, making jumps, hitting enemies and trying to make your way to the boss.

The games story is all about Kid Ying’s quest to save the kidnapped Princess Yuki, yes this may seem like an average boring plot but the game is just so fun and so silly that you can’t help but fall in love with it. Cut scenes are illustrated vibrantly, with large, comical characters bursting at the seams with the kind of personality not often seen outside of the very best cartoons. The soundtrack, in this game is also worthy of praise it is quite simply superb. You'd struggle to find many superior scores in the SNES library. It is up there with the likes of Mario World, F Zero, Zelda a link to the past and I believe that this is true of the game itself.

The game's greatest selling point without a shadow of a doubt is its co-operative play. Yes it is still a good game if you decide to attempt it on your own but with a friend it is so much more, you will laugh together compete while trying to earn cash at mini game but ultimately work together to try and beat the game. I played this game off and on for years at both home and at my friend’s house the little animations between levels had us in tears, kid Ying would be in a raft while Dr Yang swam behind him being chased by a shark for example, it was the brilliant little subtle bits the looks on characters faces, there is just such attention to small details.

The controls are so perfect that there is no real need to talk about them, they just work, you never feel like any hit or death was anything apart from your own fault, the game also has a great learning curve, it gets very hard latter but the first few levels help build you up and get ready for the challenges that will face you. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a brilliantly fun, wonderfully colourful, and extremely challenging in the latter stages adventure. It is a hard game to criticise, I could tell you of the hundreds and hundreds of times when I have played the early levels of it again and again and that I have only ever finished it once and that might sound bad, but it’s not. Every moment spent messing around on this game was a moment of pure joy. Unlike a lot of comedy games that are released this one is actually funny, and not chuckle funny, it is seriously laugh out loud funny at times.

I would give this game 9 out of 10 and strongly recommend it. If you want to play it then it will cost you about 30quid for a pal cart, about 20 for a usa one and more if you want it boxed. It is worth this amount but it is also available on the Wii virtual console which would offer some people a much cheaper and easier way to try it. It also made its way on to the Super Famicom Mini but not tour equivalent Super Nintendo classic mini.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Thu Feb 08, 2018 2:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.

RPM Racing (short for Radical Psycho Machine Racing) is a Super Nintendo Entertainment System racing game developed by a company which still exists but most people have probably never heard of Silicon & Synapse they are now known as Blizzard Entertainment a name most people will be a lot more familiar with. The game was published by Interplay (who many of you may know as the original creators of the fallout series).A lot of people won’t have heard of RPM but even those who have will not realise the connections it has to other racing games. RPM was basically an enhanced remake of a Commodore 64 program called Racing Destruction Set which was developed by Electronic Arts in 1985. It also has a much more famous and well known sequel which quite a few of you will have at least heard of, if not played.

RPM was one of the first SNES games developed in 'High Resolution Graphics Mode. This mode was supposed to allow for sharper details but at the expense of the number of colours used. It was a very early release in generalThe logic engine and track editor for RPM were apparently ported almost directly from the previously mentioned Racing Destruction Set with only some modification to get it running on the 16-bit SNES.

Graphically, this game just looks very basic. At first it doesn’t look to bad but you will soon notice that all the tracks conform to a basic kit format. You have green grass which represents the areas outside of the track, and then the tracks are made up of a mix of dark grey pavement, brown for the dirt sections, a bit of blue for ice, and light grey cement columns which prop up the raised areas. The repetitive scenery soon kind of grates on you, it practical but a little boring.

The Sound is so boring and unmemorable you will forget about it the second you turn the game off, the effects are passable but that’s the best I can say about them.

You are probably waiting for the point at which I say the game is saved by its story or its playability well in all honesty there is no real storyline at all, can’t complain too much as many good racers have had no story at all. You know you are supposed to win and in a good game that can be enough.

The game goes a bit like this you start the game with nearly $5,000 this is just enough to buy a car but this is ok as the first few races are free to enter. The payout for the free to enter races isn’t great but you soon earn enough to pay the small entry fee to other races which have much better payouts if you win.

You then spend your time managing your funds, how much do you spend on upgrading your car and how much do you hold back to pay entrance fee’s As you progress to higher and higher levels, the pay-outs become increasingly larger, but the game naturally gets harder and harder. In order to earn cash, you must finish in the top 3 or you won’t win anything meaning if you have paid an entrance fee you will in fact loose cash.

So where does the Psycho of the title come in to it you might be asking? Well as well as buying upgrades you can buy Nitro boosts, mines and oil slicks. If you use them well they might help you if used well but you will have to buy them again if you want to use them in a following race. Yes you can you lay mines and oil but so can your opponents. If you run over a mine, either one planted by the cpu or one of your own your car explodes. This doesn’t kill you though, you just wait a few seconds before your car reappears and you can continue racing. Oil slicks will cause you to skid out of control again wasting time.

One sort of different thing is that you don’t have to race every track. It is all about making enough cash to buy your way up the levels, so if you find one track per level that your unbeatable at there is nothing to stop you just hammering this one again and again for maximum profit.

The main problem this game suffers from in my opinion though is a complete absence of the feeling of speed. You literally feel like your crawling around the tracks when compared to other racers, but there is still something there, the hint of greatness. If the game could be just a little more exciting, a little more colourful, if it could just feel a little faster something in you tells you that it could be a darn good game.

This is where the Sequel comes in to play. If I was to tell you that at one stage RPM Racing 2 was in the works you would probably ask well why haven’t I heard of it? What went wrong? Nothing went wrong however it just got a new name and had heaps of colour and style thrown on to it… The Sequel was called Rock and Roll racing.

Should you buy RPM? That depends. Do you enjoy games even if they have faults? Are you interested in seeing the way that a game develops? RPM is an average game a 5 out of 10 but as a prototype for rock and roll racing it is a curious piece of video game history. RPM as far as I know never got a pal release, it only came out in America and Japan. The American version is seldom seen on these shores so you would most likely be looking at either importing it or waiting and checking ebay again and again until one comes up for sale. It is not on any download service as far as I know and this is very unlikely to change in the future. Take my Advice look for Rock and Roll racing instead it’s a much better game

I have talked about lot of games which happen to be on multiple platforms often this has either been a game which is on both the snes and the megadrive, or a game that originated on the amiga and then finally made its way to the SNES as well as just about every other machine known to man.

Now I am going to start with some clues/information about the game and see how quickly anyone who is reading this can guess what the game is.

The game I am going to talk about now was on the SNES and the Megadrive and it was one of those games which didn’t try to be the same on both system, no both versions were very different, it was also however on the NES.

The NES version of this game was the final game Konami released for the platform in both North America and Europe in 1994. The Nes version of this game was also the only version of this game to not be released in Japan. The character roster is different in each of the 3 versions as is the story.

If you know this game then this will be the clue that defiantly lets you know what this game is. The game came out during the one on one fighter boom and has been referred to by some as a street fighter clone.

In case you haven’t realized it I am talking about Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: Tournament Fighters as it was called in Europe. In the USA it was called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, and in Japan it was known as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Warriors. Now with a lot of games the name will be the same in the UK and the USA but the reason for the change here had very little to do with the games designers.Apparently those in control of the media in the UK decided that the term “ninja” was too violent, and ninjas were too violent of a subject expose children to. So the turtles became Heroes as this was much less violent. The censorship of the original cartoons didn’t end there though. Michelangelo one of the turtles chosen weapons were nunchakus and they were deemed to be too violent. The other turtles used a staff, a pair of swords and a pair of Sai which we all know are far less deadly weapons made from cotton wool and fairy kisses. It didn’t even stop here though. Eventually further editing would result in the loss of the turtles “Let's kick shell!” battle cry being removed as it was also apparently far too violent and we lost the use of the term “Bummer” due to the fact that in the UK, "bumming" is a slang word for anal sex and the term "bummer" was use by some as slang for somebody who likes to partake in this. Yes I have digressed a little in to a moan about censorship. Thankfully by the time we got to this game even though the term heroes was kept Mikey was allowed to use his nunchakus.

I grew up with the turtles, they were everywhere when I was a youngster, they had their own TV show, there on series of films, their own series of NES games, a whole line of toys and then the usual lunchboxes, sweets, pencils. They had a SNES game an amazing walk along beat em up which I wish I still owned but I had largely grown out of them by the time Tournament fighters was announced. Yeah I still knew who they were, still played the arcade game every chance I could get but they weren’t the center of my life anymore. The very second this game was announced people began talking about how it was just another street fighter 2 rip off, and that it would be a babyish piece of trash which could never hope to even approach any of the brilliance of Capcom’s classic title yet I saw the name Konami and I didn’t doubt for one moment that it would be something special. I remember getting it one year for my birthday, I didn’t wait for it to be cheap or anything I just said to my mum ‘’mum I need this game, I would like it for my birthday’’ without ever having played it, I don’t think I even waited for a review score and this is very not me, usually I want everything for as little as possible and only if I know what I am getting myself into. I got it for my birthday and immediately started playing it.

So yes it is a ‘‘Street Fighter II'' rip-off and if you want to rip into this game that would be one of the best places to start. It is a 2d one on one fighter, carton based graphics, there are moves which are basically this games versions of fire balls and dragon punches but once you get past the games origin there is not much to moan about at all. Back in the day you got fighter after fighter made by Capcom they were pretty much the kings of the whole genre, then you got Midways Mortal Kombat and of course there were the Neo Geo snk games. There was also a lot of broken fighters trying to ride on the back of this popularity wave but Konami really surfer over the top of all of this floatsam and jetsam so much so that I have to say that it is a real pity that they didn’t try more often as they could really have given Capcom some good competition.

You might think that the fact the turtles use weapons would change things but they don’t really, beyond how it looks they might as well be punching each other. There are plenty of modes such as Story mode, Tournmanet mode, Vs. Mode, ''Watch'' mode, basically everything you could hope for from a fighter at this games time of release.

The turtles themselves are all great to control, they kind of come across as the middle fighters you know the sort medium power, medium speed but other than this they all feel very different, which is a surprise as I was expecting them to be largely palette swaps with different weapons painted on top. From the point of view of a turtles fan some of the choices for other characters might be strange there is the robot turtle Chrome Dome, the Rat King and Shredder. Beyond this though some of the other characters seem slightly strange choices either having been made for the game or only having featured in the comics and not the TV show. You have the bat-like Wingnut, the Shark Armaggedon, a demonic long-clawed creature called War, a female Ninja who looks a bit like a SNK character who snuck her way in to the game. Some characters were held back and instead feature in the Megadrive and Nes versions (each version has a different roster) but you cant help but stop and wonder who the heck is this tit and where is Bebop and rocksteady, where are Casie Jones and Baxter Stockman. Yes other characters appear in the background street fighter 2 style but you would expect from a marketing point of view that they would slam the most well known characters in to the game not lesser known comic based ones.

Graphics look great they are bright colorful and full of detail, I would say that it is one area in which the game clearly gives the street fighter 2 games of the time a nice sound pounding. The Music is pretty good as well it fits within the game and gets you in the mood but there is nothing there which would rival the likes of street fighter tunes, nothing you will find yourself humming in the shower really it’s just fine functional stuff. Overall this is one of THE best fighting games on the SNES

Apparently though despite getting mostly rave reviews due to certain factors such as bad timing it didn't sell anywhere near as well as it should have. Now I love street fighter 2 world warriors and I feel that with each version Capcom got better and better but I cant help but wonder what Konami could have achieved if this thing had sold like hot cakes. It was basically there first attempt at doing something like this and I think they beat world warrior and depending on the day of the week you ask me I might even say this is better than turbo (today I would), so what would we have got if they had carried on and perfected the formula with a sequel or two? I guess we will never know

I give this game an 8.5 out of 10. It is a brilliant game and if you want to play it then most likely due to licenses and such you will have to track down an original cart. Unfortunately the game seems to now be around 20 to 25quid on ebay just for a cart but if you’re a fan of one on one fighters I think it’s worth it.

I realise that with switching from one forum to another people might not realise this is game number 61 in my series of SNES reviews. So here is the link to my blog featuring all of the old ones. http://kerr9000.blog.co.uk/

I had planned to try and keep this positive. I had enjoyed the original arcade machine as a young child at the end of various peers and in the back of the occasional family pub, chip shop etcetera. I wanted to be fair but when I put it in the cartridge slot I noticed a sticker on the back of my cartridge a sticker for how much someone had paid for this game once upon a time in dollars, this sticker says $15 and bearing in mind the sticker is on the actual cart I am going to assume they paid this for just the cartridge. I was lucky in that I spent 1pound on it.

Pit-Fighter was originally a 1990 arcade game by Atari Games. It featured characters who were created by capturing the movements of real people and then putting them into the game and this was pre mortal kombat. Pit fighter as far as I know was the second fighting game to use digitized sprites the first being a game which never reached our shores. When I first saw it in the arcade it looked amazing now days it looks very choppy but the SNES version now that never looked good in the first place. If you take Mortal Kombats conversion from the arcade to the SNES and look at it for the moment ignoring the lack of blood on focusing on everything else then you will see that while there are some subtle differences which let you know that the SNES version is a slightly cut down version, you would probably note that if you were not comparing them side by side then most likely no reasonable person would really notice the difference. In comparison to this though Pit fighter on the SNES stands out like a sore thumb. The difference between them looks about as vast as it would if you tried to port Super Mario 64 on to the NES but at least that would probably still play well.

Now the arcade pit fighter wasn’t exactly a masterpiece. It was a fun violent little fighting game which was better in premise than it was in execution. I think I mostly enjoyed it because I got to play it with my brother and it reminded me of some of the films I had watched as a kid for example Blood sport starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. The SNES game as well as having inferior graphics, no real presentation or music seems to have far more hit and miss style gameplay. The arcade machine was tough but it felt beatable, you'd shove 20pence piece after 20pence piece into it convinced that you could reach the end. With the SNES version however you get no continues, you are expected to defeat the whole game on one credit which in a good game like street fighter 2 would be a challenge trying to do this on SNES Pit fighter though is like trying to punch your way through a solid brick wall, hard painful and an exercise in futility.

I try to not be an angry reviewer and to give everything its fair chance but this has to be the worst SNES game I have played so far I wouldn't recommend anyone buy it under almost any circumstances, if you’re a collector and you see it for 1quid and plan to throw it in the cupboard with some of your other games and just forget about it then yeah sure, but if you are looking for something worth more than this or which you plan to play save yourself the bother… 0.5 out of 10….

“I was also playing the Willow arcade game, which inspired me to push the visual quality on the SNES above other games. I wanted it to be as good a side-scroller as Contra or Castlevania, with the visual quality of arcade games such as Willow’’

Now the above quote is from one of the people responsible for the game I am going to talk about now and it seems rather fitting. When I first played this game it reminded me a little bit of a mix between Grazor (the spectrum version of contra) and Turrican (which I had played on the amiga). If you know these games then you will probably be able to see these connections as soon as I name the game the Willow factor needs a little bit of an explanation however.

Most of you will probably know that Willow was a fantasy film starring Warwick Davies. A lot of people though don’t even realise that it had an arcade game made from it. It was a side scrolling adventure game following the plot of the movie, it had nice bright cartoon style graphics which really showed off the characters, you could instantly recognise who was who and what was supposed to be what.

This is what they wanted to achieve they wanted to take a very famous film and turn it into a game, a game which would be full of action but have character models who were instantly recognisable, the game I am talking about is SUPER STARWARS.

The first thing I feel I need to talk about is the presentation. Thegame succeeds in recreating the atmosphere of the film remarkably well, it has all of the little touches you could possibly want such as the opening text crawl the Lucas-esque screen wipes and the wonderful 16bit rendition of John Williams’ classic music.

Super Starwars sort of follows the plot of the film the levels are based in the right places and there are story-progressing cut-scenes. Some things have been altered though but in ways which will make it work as a game. For example the Jawa’s holding R2D2 just happen for some unknown reason to keep a Lava Beast in the basement floor of their sandcrawler as a pet and you have to murder it. You can see why this was added though, it was to put a boss encounter into this stage of the game, in much the same way as a parts of a book will be altered to better suit the medium of film here the film has been changed to suit a video game. You can tell though that the team which worked on this game took a great deal of pride in it and really attempted to present something which would be both an authentic a Star Wars experience as well as just a darn good game.

The team used actual reference materials and photos from Lucasfilm’s photo library, and took pictures of the actual movie models from the Lucas Archives for reference purposes and I think this really shows in the final product. Nothing else on any console at the time seemed to show this level of dedication and with a few notable exceptions (Alien Isolation for example) you would be hard pressed to find a modern game which has this much attention to detail.

One of the things that people talk about a lot with this game is the difficulty. It is often called a hard game but I don’t really think it is necessarily that bad. I think there is a definite issue with its difficulty curve, the problem being that it gets far too hard to quickly for the average player. The difficulty seems to curve straight up into the air and into a brick wall in one far from smooth movement. Once you get past a certain point though it seems to get easier again, it goes from hair pulling to just a nice challenge. I guess someone needed to do a little more play testing on it to iron this blip out. There are a few moments where one tiny miss step can lead to you falling back to the bottom of a bunch of stuff you have been climbing and it’s not that it’s hard to get back up it’s just that if this happens to you a couple of times in a row it can be enough to make you invent new swear words, on playing this game for review I let scream with the term ‘’you god damn nerf turd burglar.’’

In conclusion, I love this game, it is one of the best movie games available on the Super Nintendo and after reviewing something as awful as pitfighter playing this was a real breathe of fresh air. I would give the game a 8 out of 10, I am teetering on the very edge of giving it a 9 but I can’t help but admit it has certain issues particularly with the difficulty curve which will provide a barrier from some people fully enjoying it. The game was released on to the virtual console on the Wii so that is one option if you would like to try it, as always another option is to try to track down a physical copy to play on the SNES. A cart of super Star Wars will cost around 10pounds which I feel is very reasonable for this game.

If I was to tell you that the Snes Game I recently played and I am here reviewing for you was a light gun game, then you would most likely assume that I own a super scope and that I was maybe playing the super scope 6 cartridge, Yoshi safari or Battle Clash. I don’t own a super scope though, I have the receiver box, the super scope 6 cart and Battle clash but I have no memory of what happened to the actual scope itself. No the game I have been playing is Lethal Enforcers.

Lethal Enforcers is a 1992 light gun based shooting game released originally in the arcades by Konami. The in-game graphics consist entirely of digitized photographs. This game caused controversy when it came out basically got it allowing you to shoot photorealistic representations of bad guys. If anything though as is usually the case the controversy only helped it gain popularity and it was soon converted for home systems including the Super NES, the Sega Mega Drive and the Sega Mega CD. Rather than adopt the game to use the light guns which these systems already possessed though Konami decided to produce its own special bun and include it with the game. This was a revolver-shaped light gun known as the Konami Justifier, it was about as close as you can get to the gun used in the arcade machine, the only real difference being the weight (the home version is much lighter).

I don’t remember anyone owning this game back in the day for the SNES, in fact I don’t even remember seeing it for sale on a store shelf. The only place I ever saw it was on the shelves of a video rental store with the name Video City. Now Video city was a great place it was a sort of independent Blockbusters rip off which was on the border of the next small village from the one I grew up in. You could walk there if you had about an hour and a half to spare, so sometimes when there was nothing better to do me and a few friends would walk down partly just to rent something, partly for something to do. I got to experience quite a few SNES, Megadrive and latter PS1 games through this place because not only did it have very low rental prices and a great selection it also had some of the very best promotions. Every Christmas they would put up decorations and the decorations included a tree on the counter. Now this tree would be covered in small folded tickets and you could buy the tickets for a small price something like 50pence. Now every ticket was a winner. I remember winning a T shirt for the film blown Away, the novelisation of Basic Instinct, lots of other promotional things and a whole bunch of free rentals.It was because of this place that I got to play Out to Lunch. The Firemen and countless other games I might otherwise have not experienced. On one fateful day though I turned up to rent a few games and they were selling off there Megadrive and Snes games to make way for Playstation games. I can’t remember everything I got but I remember getting both Lethal Enforcers and Out to lunch. Lethal Enforcers cost me about 10quid for the game and the gun. As for the game itself the graphics are great. The game’s backgrounds look photorealistic, and are full of details even if you can tell some bits are repeated again and again (You can see the same few store/building names fly past again and again while your shooting from a car). The enemies in the game look exactly the same as the arcade’s cardboard cut-outs. It is a very faithful adaption of the arcade machine the only real difference being the typical Nintendo effect (the blood effects in the game have been changed to sweat just like in mortal kombat), and while this is a little disappointing ,it doesn’t really alter anything.The game’s sound is pretty darn good. The gunhsot sounds are perfect, they are very realistic for a videogame particular for one of this age. The characters in the game all have realistic voices; but its more than that there is a real attention to detail the enemies sound like the bad guys you would expect, and the victims sound truly terrified this really adds to the games presentation.

The gameplay is as simple as can be. You shoot at the bad guys and try to hit them before they hit you while trying to avoid hitting any civilians. The gameplay is fast and frenetic. Enemies appear directly in front of you or in the distance, in window etcetera. You can shoot a bullet that is shot at you, or you can make sure you take out the enemy before they manage to get a shot off, get them before they get you it’s as simple as that.The game is your standard arcade shooter you have a limited number of levels to complete each with a boss and this won’t take you long to do at all. You will see everything this game has to offer very quickly. Nothing has really been added to the arcade machine to give it any more lasting appeal once it’s in your home. The game works very well with the gun but obviously you need to use an old TV. I had to go round to my brothers with the SNES in a backpack to play this again as I no longer have a CRT Television in my house and one day with them not being produced and parts becoming rarer no one will. The game does work with a pad but its just not the same what is a fast game of quick responses becomes rather slow and clunky.

It’s a crying shame that this game and its sequel never got either ported to the wii, I suppose there is already a lot of completion there with the house of the dead games and ghost squad, Mad Dog Mcree and all of the other various lightgun games but I would have loved to have seen this come out.

So should you buy this game? It’s a tough call there are very similar games available for the Wii as well as the PS3 (time crisis). Well the cheapest I have seen the cart and the gun go for is about 25quid but remember you need an old style TV as well this could get you a whole pile of Wii gun games. I would give lethal enforcers a 7. It’s a lot of fun but only in short bursts and you have to go through a fair bit of trouble to play it now.

Bomberman can best be described as a strategic, maze-based battle game. I will mostly be talking about the first SNES version but it’s important to realise how long running the franchise is. The first Bomberman game was originally developed by Hudson Soft and was released in 1983 for the MSX, NEC PC-8801, NEC PC-6001, Sharp MZ-700 and FM-7 in Japan, and for the MSX and ZX Spectrum in Europe. Believe it or not we were not introduced to the game as bomberman though, it was sold in the UK under the title ‘’Eric and the Floaters’’, and in Spain as Don Pepe Y Los Globos (which translates to something on the lines of Don Pepe and the Globe).

Bomberman has featured in over 70 different games on numerous systems he has also been the star of several anime and manga series. The series is still doing well it had an impressive xbox live online game and has even more recently there has been a new iOS game released. His franchise is one of the most commercially successful of all time. It didn’t really enter my life until a Japanese copy of the original game graced the shelf’s of my local video game store. Now the cover was inviting but then very few games have bad Japanese cover art so I wasn’t going to let that sway me in to a purchase. I picked up the box and looked at the graphics on the back and liked what I saw but I did wonder if there would be any language barrier, sounds silly mentioning that now but at the time I didn’t know how simple a game it would be. I had also spent 5pounds on some Japanese Megadrive game a week or two before to learn that it was completely in Japanese and so text heavy that I couldn’t do anything on it. Bomberman was also a lot more, it was about 20pounds.

Now days I would go home and jump on the internet and been able to find out a whole pile of information on the game but back then this wasn’t an option. So I did what you used to do back then and that was looked hard at the box until I gathered my thoughts and feelings together and took the plunge.

The basic gameplay of Super Bomberman is pretty darn simple, I think this is one of the cases where you really can use the old chestnut ‘’easy to pick up difficult to master’’. The gameplay in this title takes place on a single non-scrolling screen. The gameplay happens in an arena and you can basically see the whole arena in a top down viewpoint, you can move horizontally or vertically around this arena but you won’t get far before finding your way blocked by a wall. Pressing the 'A' button will make your character drop a bomb at his feet. There will be a period of time in which the bomb will get ready to explode, you will get used to watching its animations and knowing how long you have left, so you drop it next to a piece of wall or an enemy and make sure your well out of the way before it goes off. The basic idea is to kill everything else whether this is other players in multiplayer or creatures in single player before you get killed. It is not quite this simple though, not only are there various icons to pick up which will either allow you to drop extra bombs or alter the radius of the bombs blast as well as differ your abilities in other ways but If a bomb explodes and the flame hits another bomb it will cause this second bomb to detonate early. This is where the game starts to be far from simple as with multiple bombs and power ups you can either intentionally or accidentally cause large chain reactions in an attempts to get your opponents.

The story mode in bomberman is playable and can be ok but really it’s not the kind of thing most people are going to invest a lot of time in. The story is a bunch of poor kiddy TV trash really, but I would tell most people to play a little bit of it, just enough to get used to how your character moves, get used to dropping bombs and seeing what there blast radius is, how to avoid the explosions basically just as a bit of practice to take you into the multiplayer with a decent foundation on how the gameplay works. The multiplayer of this game is the real game, this is what you want to buy the title for. You could either buy it with a multi tap or buy one separately either way it was possible to play this game with 3 of your friends and when you had all gotten a hang of the controls it could turn in to a wonderful game. It was a real edge of the seat competitive sofa based game. I can remember being in parties where there would be about 7 of us sat there 4 playing, the others waiting for their turn in winner stays on home tournaments. When people got good at it then it could become a real tense battle, person against person mind against mind reflex against reflex. This is where I have to mention the music, it was brilliant little tunes full of excitement which really went well with the on screen action.

So should you buy Super Bomberman for your SNES? Well it is a great game at least for multiplayer if you have friends willing to play with you I could happily give this game a 9 maybe even a 10 (it would score nowhere near as high as this as a single player game). Well its price changes wildly I have seen copies of the cart on its own go for about 10quid but then I have seen carts go for as high as 30. Then factor in the fact that if you want to play it with friends then you’re going to need a multitap, the cheapest available for sale I have seen is around the 15quid mark and then of course you need enough pads to fill the taps ports. Bomberman has had a lot of sequels and they are all very similar, and they are pretty much all brilliant Bomberman Live can be got on the Xbox 360 Live service for 6.75 and you will not need a multitap and your much more likely to have friends who can bring their pads around. So In this case unless you’re a die hard collector then I would go for a more modern version of this game.

Last edited by kerr9000 on Sun Mar 11, 2018 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It seems to have been awhile but here I am back to talking about a Super Nintendo game which started its life as an Amiga game. The original Putty was a game developed by a company called System 3 and released on the Commodore Amiga in 1992. It was then ported to the SNES in 1993, with the word Super thrown in front of it in that good old standard Super Nintendo way, at least that was the case for Europe and North America. In Japan its super famicom name was Putty Moon (that name makes me think of button moon).After this it was released on the ill-fated Commodore Amiga CD32 ( A CD based Amiga basically) in 1994 keeping the revised name Super Putty.In Super Putty, you control a small round blue ball of well putty I guess that can punch, jump, and morph in to other things. Most games of this type would have you working from left to right but the end of the levels in this game are always at the top, so you spend your time working upwards.

Why are you working upwards? Whats the story? Well ok it’s a little bit weird but I will try to give the jist of it without sounding like I have escaped from a secure facility. Dazzledaze, the wizard has decided that if he captures these little blue Putty creatures who come from a place called Putty Moon well then he can put wrappers on them and sell them as screaming bubble-gum. You are one of the last little puttys left so it’s your job to try and save the others and stop him. See that story is not strange or weird at all.

The graphics are not too bad, they are bright, colourful, and kind of cute even if they are not exactly earth shattering. The music is also good if not perfect, the best thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t grate and every piece of it seems to fit the theme of the level that it is used in. The sound effects are suitably cartoony Putty makes little pain noises when he gets hurt, as well as burping when he has been made to absorbing something. The only problem I have with the sound in this game is that certain noises can grate on you (the machine guns, race cars and a few other bits and pieces) but it only really becomes an issue when the screen is filled with either one or a mix of these things.

I don’t mean to really harp on and on about games that started off on the Amiga, I owned an Amiga 500 myself and spent a long time on it, the problem is that games which were made for the Super Nintendo by companies that were focused purely on console games play more to the machines strengths. The area where I start to have issues with putty is with the way it plays. The controls aren't awful but they do feel clumsy in places when it comes to trying to make Putty do certain things for example when you try to make him stretch. This is an issue I never had with for example Super Mario World. This led to me feeling that on occasions I had died because of the controls not because of my lack of skill.

There are quite a few ways to die in this game, not only are there the normal enemies but there are also some instant-death traps such as safes which will drop on you and spikes you can fall on. You will also die if you run out of time. Sure there are pitfalls and time limits like this in other games such as the Mario titles but there less of an issue when you have tight controls. In latter levels this game does tend to feel a little cheap, it pushes a lot of enemies at you, a lot of which don’t die very easily. There are a lot of levels in this game, and they are pretty large but most people will probably rage quit long before they see the end of the game or will simply grow tired of what the game offers.

This game is basically a nice bog standard 6 out of 10 platformer. If you want to try this game then one advantage is that it’s not exactly expensive, you should be able to get a loose cart for around 7quid, I have even seen boxed copies go for as little as 12quid.(prices 15/01/2015 dated added due to constant flux of game prices) There was also a sequel on the SNES called Putty Squad, this has been ported to various Sony platforms including the PS4 but has been universally battered by critics, I haven’t played it but it would appear that it’s had very little done to it, it’s been on sale for around 6quid several times.

Mortal Kombat II was originally released as an arcade machine in 1993. It was later ported to pretty much all the major home systems, including the PC, Amiga, Game Boy, Game Gear, Megadrive/ Genesis, Saturn, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and PlayStation. It is still selling nowadays on the download systems of more modern machines (usually in a pack with its prequel and direct sequel). I don’t think the game needs to big an Introduction seeing as I have already talked about the original.

Now we all know the SNES and Nintendo themselves had the reputation of being kind of kiddy, in fact Sega tried its hardest to remind us of this fact in order to promote itself and its own machines. So when Mortal Kombat 2 was released full of gore and finishing moves it was a huge shock at the time. After all the SNES version of the original had been a nuterd version largely over shadowed by the Megadrive one due to its lack of blood. However this time SNES owners got the blood, so it was now an even fight hardware against hardware without any ‘’unfair advantage’’

Mortal Kombat II introduced more varied Fatality finishing moves and new characters such as Kitana, Kung Lao, Mileena, baracka and it introduced the series' recurring villain Shao Kahn as well as giving his minion Shang Tsung a major revamp (making him younger and playable) The Story continues from the first game.

It is all about the next Mortal Kombat tournament which is set another realm called Outworld (The home of Shao Kahn, Shang Tsung etcetera)This game really helped turn Mortal Kombat from a successful game into a legacy, sure you could argue that it was just more, more and better but when you look at how small the updates are for some fighting games, such as 4 new characters on the exact same engine justifying a whole new full retail game MK2 really made sure it gave you some bang for your bucks.

It gave you 5 new playable characters, 2 new bosses and 3 hidden opponents, all new backdrops. The possibilities when it came to finishing your opponent were greatly increased, In the original each character had 1 finisher, here all the characters had 2 violent finishing moves and then they had a friendship move each and then there was babeality (you turn your opponent in to a baby) this allowed you to either end your fight in a gruesome or amusing way.

Street Fighter 2 may have been the more serious, skilled fighting game but with Mortal Kombat you felt the series was moving forward in a much better way, they were listening to the fans, they were teasing the fans, allowing rumours to spread and then integrating a few of them in to designs for new characters as a gamer back then this made me feel connected to them, in a small way it made you feel like your feedback and opinion mattered.

This game was and is very satisfying to play, the punches look and sound real even though the resulting blood flow is over the top. The games graphics are brilliant for the time and the soundtrack fits it amazingly. The music really does its job of getting you pumped up ready to fight and then it helps keep the tempo of the game going. The game just reeks of atmosphere but never takes itself too seriously. The balance between gore and humour is always just right and I think this is something many of its imitators missed the mark with. This game made you feel that Mortal Kombat had a real chance at continuing for a long time, sure the first had made a decent impression but there was that lingering doubt that maybe it was just a one of lucky trick shot, this is the game that really let you know it was here to stay.

I would give this game an 8 out of 10 without a shadow of a doubt, catch me in a good mood full of the joys of spring and it might even manage a 9. Do I recommend buying this for your SNES? Well if you have a SNES and a bunch of pads and really want a new game then yes give it a bash if you’re lucky you can probably get a cart for around the 10quid price point. If however you have a lot of consoles particularly current ones or a PC with a good gaming pad you might be better off looking at downloading the Mortal Kombat arcade collection which has the first 3 games on it, and not ports actual arcade perfect versions. If you have an Xbox 360 or PS3 I also highly recommend the last Mortal Kombat game released especially if you can find its ultimate edition with extra characters (including Freddy Kruger) which most likely wouldn't cost you much more.

Anyone who has tried to collect or even purchase SNES games to play in the last 10 years has probably been met with the sight of certain carts again and again. It can be annoying as you see a box full of carts on some dealers market stall and you flick through them to go oh yeah that again. It is not an issue unique to SNES collecting, at times I have seen enough loose sonic 2 carts in one place that you could build a small pyramid with them.One game like this on the Super Nes though is Super Tennis, now I am not going to pretend to know how many cartridges of this were manufactured nor am I going to rush and look it up so I can dazzle you with numbers but if I was to Hazard a guess I would say a lot. Just about every friend I had who had a SNES growing up had this game. It probably helped that it was the first of its kind on the system.

Tennis as a sport is one of those things I don’t think I have ever completely understood sure I went through that stage of buying a nice proper metal racket and entering a tournament but I was knocked out in round one by a local lad who was a Tennis genius. I didn’t score a single point, he batted me so bad I never picked up a racket again unless it was at school and I was being made to and then I would do it with a heavy sigh and treat the whole exercise like I was being led to the electric chair. I can sometimes manage to watch a bit of it on the Telly but the whole dressed in white pims and sandwiches thing just kind of does my head in. However, it has to be said that in the sports meet video games world Tennis was the one sport which really got the ball rolling if you’ll forgive the pun. I mean in all honesty Pong is basically a computerised version of Tennis (lets face it and I will get hate from some quarters for this ping pong is close quarters mini tennis).So any of us truly old school gamers will have sat through a lot of different electronic bat and ball games, starting from tiny dots being hit by rectangle bats, then from there to very crude cartoon men till we got where we are now with the likes of both super realistic tennis simulations with every blade of grass lovingly animated and fun quirky highly developed cartoon games such as Wii Sports Tennis, Sega Superstar Tennis etc.

Super Tennis sticks in my mind as one of the best examples of the genre from its time. As a single player game it soon becomes boring so I will glide over that however in two-player mode this game really shines. It is a tense competitive multiplayer game. The range of buttons on the Super Nintendo pad are used to enable the player to make a large range of different shots, all of which lead to multiple possibilities. This was the first time I remember playing a Tennis game which really got me thinking, got me trying to quickly plan the trajectory of the ball, to plan the best way to return it to try and score a point. Sometimes I would even think several moves ahead trying to lure my opponent to one side of the screen or the other hoping to quickly return the ball to the other side so quickly he couldn’t hope to get it. With a computer this is only fun for a short length of time as you will work out what it can and can’t deal with but with real life opponents this is where the game really comes in to its own. With two skilled players competing it can become as beautiful as any game of street fighter 2. If you have a group of friends who gather and play games together drop this into your Super NES and play winner stays on, you’ll be almost guaranteed to hear your friends make all kinds of noises in the background as balls are skilfully returned or when they are just missed.

Super Tennis is a simple game to look at. A lot of the graphics are function, the players are drawn well for the time and there is enough variation between them so it feels like you’re playing with a different person and you never get confused in doubles games; and the courts are all different colours you can easily differentiate between playing on different court types.

The spectators while not being important to the actual game play are super basic it looks like they’ve just used player sprites and pasted them into place without enough variety to pull it off. Weighed against this though there are some brilliant effects such as when Mode 7 is used to scale the camera in and out of the court during an introduction or when the players switch sides. Overall it is kind of a mixed bag but it does everything needed of it and doesn’t get in the way of some pretty darn good gameplay

The sound effects are beautiful the sound of the ball hitting the racket, and the court are basic but they are spot on and really add to the atmosphere. Different types of strokes sound different if the ball is slashed it sounds one way if it’s smashed it sounds another. The music is light and bubbly but well used, its only really there when it feels it needs to be and doesn’t drown out the game itself.

With a little effort you can get a cart of this online for around 5quid which is a fair price, however I have seen it sell for closer to the 2quid mark in real life. If you ever flick past it in a box of retro stuff at some car boot or convention and its cheap I recommend you don’t just go urgh a Tennis game and ignore it, it’s not a bad game at all I’d give it a 7 out of 10 and that’s from someone who is not a fan of the sport (I do find it dull on your own though)

Double Dragon had been one of the first side-scrolling beat-‘em-ups which really found its place in the word of games. Originally an arcade game, home versions were released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari ST, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Genesis/Mega Drive and Atari Lynx, among other platforms. It was a much loved game and it spawned two sequels in the arcades both of which went on to make their way to a wide series of platforms. When it came time for a 4th entry in the series however this one was produced purely for the SNES, making it the first Double Dragon game not to originate in the arcades and also the first Double Dragon game to not be released across multiple platforms.

The forth Double Dragon was called Super Double Dragon in both the North American and Pal region while in Japan it was known as Return of Double Dragon , of course as a continuation to the series it is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up. It was released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992. It was published by Technōs Japan in Japan and by Tradewest in North America and the PAL region. Now the SNES was quiet well known for its walk along beat em ups including the final fight series, Rival Turf, Turtles in Time, and of course there were others some of which although less famous you will have heard of if you have read all of my reviews such as Sonic Blast Man and The Combatribes.

As per usually in this series, you take control of either Billy or Jimmy Lee or both if you’re playing with a friend. The objective is to proceed through each stage and defeat all of the enemies, including the levels boss. The game consists of seven stages, including a casino, an airport, a gym, a city slum, a forest, and others. The games variation in stages is pretty good even though I think the variation in enemies is a little lacking. What I do like though is that there seems to be quite a few options open to you when it comes to attacking. You have a button to punch, one to kick, one to jump but you also have a guard button for blocking attacks. This guard buttons is one of my favourite bits of the game because if you time your press of the guard button just right then rather than just blocking a blow you can also grab certain enemies in an arm grab, leaving the enemy vulnerable to your retaliation.

The game play moves noticeably slower than previous games in the series, and if you have played games like Final Fight then it almost seems like everything is happening in slow motion. At first this took some getting used to but in the end I think I actually enjoyed this speed because it gives the game a different flavour to all of those other beat em ups out there, it becomes less of a game of instinct and more of a slow strategy based affair.So far I have been largely positive but I can’t stay that way forever, some of the animations in the game are good, but the actual graphics themselves are kind of weedy especially when you take in to account that this game was built for the SNES, we aren’t dealing with some multi-platform game here which needed to hedge its bets, it was a SNES game through and through and I feel far better advantage could have been made of the SNES’s graphical capabilities. This is a problem I also have with the sound/music, the SNES was during its peak the best sounding machine on the market, easily able to produce tunes that you would hum all day, now the soundtrack here is not awful but I feel it is really lacking.

It feels a little rushed and under developed this opinion is supported by the fact that Muneki Ebinuma the games lead designer published a commentary about his involvement in the development of the game in 2004 in which he stated original plans for the game which he says he was unable to follow due to time constraints. The game was supposed to feature cut scenes introducing the bosses, adding to their impact. There was also supposed to be cut scenes between stages and a proper full ending sequence. The actual game lacks any real plot beside these guys are bad punch them in the mouth, if the above had been included the plot was supposed to involve Billy and Jimmy Lee investigating a criminal organization known as the Shadow Warriors. They would be investigating them because of their possible connection to the disappearances of several local martial artists. Eventually they would come face to face with the gang’s leader Duke, who would've been revealed to have been a childhood friend of the Lee brothers adding an element of drama to the games climax.

Now unfortunately I can only review this game based on what is there and not what could have been. As it stands I think the game is a real 6 out of 10 kind of game it’s on that fine line between average and good. I certainly wouldn’t spend a tonne on it and there are plenty of other games I would try and get before it. The only times I have seen this game online it’s been like 40pounds for a European or American cart with a Japanese one being closer to 20. If you have the ability to play foreign games and need this game I’d go for the Japanese version but in all honesty I would probably leave it.

As I have pointed out most of the time for the sake of these reviews I am playing games from my very own collection but sometimes if I see something cheap enough I will pick up a game with the sole purpose of reviewing it. The game I am going to talk about today cost me 2pounds which is a price you really can’t argue with when it comes to getting something to play on your Super Nintendo. The game I got was Super Battle tank.

When I first put the cartridge in and started playing the game another game instantly came to mind and this was the old arcade machine Battlezone which was a wire framed vector graphics tank game from the early 80’s. This was a feeling that never really left me no matter how long I spent with the game, sure there was a big step up in graphics after all Battlezone’s simple wire frames had been updated Absolute had created an engine which used the same king of blending of 2-D and 3-D graphics that Midway used to animate the characters in the first few Mortal Kombat games which had led to something that back in 1992 we all would have been more than happy to term realistic. In this case though these new found graphics didn’t fill the whole screen in fact they only filled about a third of it with the remaining room dedicated to one flat graphic used to represent the inside of the tank showing your gauges and such. This kind of works in the way that if you were operating a tank this is what you would see but you can’t help but wonder how much of this is done as a way to save on memory/resources… Was the game like this purely due to a cosmetic choice made by someone? Could this engine have showed the action on a full sized screen without slowing down or spluttering? These are questions I simply don’t have enough information to answer.Ok as for how this plays well the X button is used to accelerate and Y decelerates, L and R are used for turning, select cycles through your four weapons, A fires the chosen weapon, and B brings up the map, and the D-Pad is used to aim your Tank's turret. I think the controls are spot on, given the buttons you have on a SNES pad and the way you would expect a tank to work they couldn’t really have done any better, these are simply the perfect controls for this type of game on this system at the time it came out. Sure I have played other tank games in the arcade or on other systems where you’ve had more control or the controls have felt more realistic but for a game at this time which was adapted to a SNES pad instead of having custom arcade controls well they did a damn fine job.

So interesting pretty darn realistic graphics for the time, good controls you’d think that this game had it all but this is where things fall apart a little, the gameplay just well for want of a better description feels kind of bland and repetitive. The way in which you take out every enemy is the same, this is because all of the Tank and helicopter A.I. in this game basically uses the exact same tactics making it very predictable. The game basically goes like this blow up as many enemies as you can before you get in trouble then repair your damage at your base rinse lather repeat. The game really needed to take some notes from something else around this kind of time period for example Project Desert Strike. Yes you could argue in Desert strike your just flying your helicopter doing the same sort of thing but then again they throw far more story at you and a lot more variation in goals and missions. (I use this as an example as they both came out during the same year). The graphics may have moved on since the likes of battlezone but the actual gameplay itself really hasn’t moved on from the arcade tank games of the 80’s leaving what was something new and fresh back then feeling kind of dated and rehashed.

The audio in the game is pretty average the tank makes satisfying sounds both for its guns and its engine which helps create the right kind of atmosphere but beyond that there is one ok music track which is simply used in between mission briefings. I guess my main issues with this game are lack of variety and lack of polish. What could have been a great game instead ends up a rather simple tank blaster which once you get past the graphics feels like even in 1992 it was old before it was even released.

I would give this game 5 out of 10, it’s an average mixed bad kind of game, you could spend your money on much worse but then you could also buy something a heck of a lot better. If you really want to try it you can tend to find it on ebay or Amazon for around 6quid for just the cart which is not too bad if you’re dying to get yourself a new SNES game, unless you’re really in to tank games though I would give it a miss.